Modern Reliance on Industry for Fighting Power

An overall plan for rapid mobilization of the country's resources to back the land, sea and air arms in the event of another war is now nearing completion at Washington. It will set forth in broad outline the steps to be taken on M-Day to put the national economy on a war footing. The mobilization plan is now scheduled for publication in November. It will be buttressed by numerous appendices giving the detailed application of the plan to men, machines and materials, but these will be kept “top secret” so far as the general public is concerned.

World War II demonstrated that exertion of the country's maximum effort in any future war will require ultimate regulation by the government of almost every human activity. At the outset, however, the success or failure of military operations is likely to be determined by the speed with which an industrial high command can be brought into being and peacetime manufacturing facilities can be converted for the mass production of war equipment.

Need of Industrial Preparedness for War

In a future war the United States is not likely to have a long period of non-belligerency, such as it had in World War II, during which a gradual conversion of the industrial plant can be carried out. Military leaders say the time factor has been reduced, if not eliminated, by (1) enemy realization that the measure of victory in the last war was provided in large part by the output of American industry, (2) new weapons with which swift and destructive attacks can be launched from long distances, (3) world changes which have left only two nations—the United States and Soviet Russia—capable of waging a major war. In an armed conflict with the Soviet Union, the United States could not count upon formidable delaying actions by allies in Western Europe to allow time for converting its industrial machine; it could count upon fifth-column efforts by Communists within its borders to delay the conversion to war production.